This is why I've been saying all along the only REAL form of security is creating and using your own private bridge. It's very cheap to do, only a few dollars a month, very fast and easy to set up with many many guides. Tor even tell you how to do it on their site. All you do is then block all incoming IP's other than your own and make sure you pay for it anonymously.
Re-read what I wrote. You lose the benefit of Entry Guards if you use your own private bridge... There is one less layer in the circuit to De-obfuscate. Furthermore, this puts you closer to the Rendevous Point and ultimately the hidden service your are accessing.
I do not think running a private bridge is a good idea from a security standpoint until there is some form of entry guards added to it's connection into the larger tor network, otherwise you are just replicating the standard problems that caused the addition of Entry Guards to the Tor protocol in the first place. The real solution here is to update the Tor protocol to address these attacks.
YMMV, if you can back up your assertion that it is more secure, then be my guest, but for the vast majority of users here, they will be much more secure using a persistent Tor connection with slowly rotating Entry Guards than they will be using a Private Tor Bridge.
The ONLY way running your own private bridge would be safe, would be if the private bridge was 100% anonymous, untraceable, and was not under surveillance.
Even a private bridge still has to deal with the problem of potentially compromised or malicious nodes, which is the fundamental problem on the Tor network, along with timing attacks.
It can really be argued both ways, and smart people take both opinions. There are clear advantages to using a private bridge:
It is far less likely to be in a given attackers list of known Tor bridges / nodes
It is far less likely to be under active surveillance than a random bridge or node, potentially making you much more secure from active timing attacks
there are clear disadvantages:
Most people don't use 'strict bridges' or private bridges. After enough time, several less than global passive attackers will probably be able to determine that some entity (you) is strictly using a private bridge. This makes you stick out from the crowd and may be cause for further investigation, possibly.
There is *no* crowding at the entry guard of a private bridge.
there are even some disadvantages to using bridges in general, for one using a bridge gives your anonymity a hit in order to give your membership concealment a big boost. For two, if the bridge fails at actually providing membership concealment it is worse than not having membership concealment in the first place, because now you stick out as someone who is using Tor who feels some need for membership concealment. In this respect, if using bridges is a very good or very bad idea depends entirely on your attackers ability to defeat the membership concealment properties of bridges.
It is actually a quite complex question and without having intelligence on the feds abilities it is not possible to come to a definitive conclusion.
Also a source of confusion seems to be the fact that bridges and entry guards serve so many roles. Looking at them from a censorship resistance perspective, Vlad is correct to suggest that you should use as many bridge nodes as possible. This is far more in line with a chinese citizens threat model than with ours though. Looking at them from a membership concealment perspective, you should use as few bridges as possible, however using less than two bridges creates serious security issues and it is probably best to use three. Looking at them as entry guards, it is clearly better to use less. It is probably best to treat them like regular entry guards, selecting no more than three at a time. Bridges used in this way become entry guards and thus you are not losing the protection of entry guards by using them.
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. I also know a lot about various credit card fraud groups / techniques / history , hacker groups / techniques / history, drug trafficking groups / techniques / history, militant groups / techniques / history, terrorist groups / techniques / history, various extremist groups / techniques / history, activist groups / techniques / history, arms smuggling groups / techniques / history.....hell I could even hold my own in a conversation about jewelry thieves groups / techniques / history and a little bit about gem smugglers.